These Are the Top 10 Most Conservative Movies?

Every so often, our modern conservatives have to prove that their experience with popular culture goes beyond condemning the people who make it, and beyond counting the number of words in a book or a play that make the baby Jeebus cry. A while back, we had John Miller of the National Review's balls-out hilarious list of the Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, which I discussed in another forum. Now comes another entrant in the sweepstakes: a list of the Top 10 Conservative movies. What I wouldn't give, as Woody Allen said in Annie Hall, for a large sock with horse manure in it.

I would prefer not to take any list seriously that calls the inadvertently hilarious Zulu "the most influential war film of the modern era." (Quick, now, film class: Name a single film that Zulu "influenced." I recall it best due to the great Godfrey Cambridge routine it inspired. "Zulus attack in a straight line. Guy fires one bullet and it goes through two-hundred Zulus!") And, you'll have to pardon me if, as an American of Irish descent, I tell the author precisely where he can stick his "most benevolent empire in history." But, as a movie fan, I feel compelled to point out that the inclusion of that awful Will Smith vehicle makes me believe that our lad here apparently has a VIP pass to that famous Esquire moviehouse, the Hell Plaza Octoplex.

The whole thing is gloriously overripe with Rule Britannia fruit salad. Zulu's the most obvious example, but the overrated, over-Oscar'd, and historically meretricious Chariots of Fire is right up there, too. The only way this is a "truly conservative masterpiece" in the British sense is through the very strong and obvious sub-plot concerning the virulent anti-Semitism practiced upon Jewish runner Harold Abrahams by the truly conservative Dons at his university. Elsewhere, apparently, our aspiring cineaste — sorry about the French there, bucko — still harbors a frigate-sized bug up his ass about Napoleon. And, come on now, The Lord of the Rings? The Orcs as evil marauding Mooooooslims? I can think of more compelling modern parallels. But can't we leave all the politics at the borders of Rivendell?

He doesn't really reach the heights of absurdity, though, until he starts mucking around with American movies. Okay, he likes Saving Private Ryan — no real surprise there. If you're going to talk about The Killing Fields, though, you at least should acknowledge the part the American bombing of Cambodia played in the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which the movie implicitly does. And the fact that he can tease some political meaning out of Rocky — let alone out of its increasingly absurd sequels — makes me wonder if I have not been right all these years in believing that film to be nothing more than a way for angry white people to beat Muhammad Ali on the screen because they couldn't beat him in the ring or in the courts or in the culture at large. In fact, between Zulu, Rocky, and the "brutal Somali warlords" in Black Hawk Down, I don't think I'm out of line in mentioning that there seems to be an ongoing theme in this list regarding the conservative values of keeping the duskier races in their place.